My experience with white wines in the box had always been that they always tasted sweet and uninteresting, as if someone had simply added some grain spirit to white Welch’s grape juice.
Then some higher end varietals started appearing in boxes. When I’ve tried those, they have seemed better than the old Almaden boxes, but they still taste sweeter than I would expect those same wines to be out of a bottle. Does anyone else notice this? Is the extra sweetness really there, somehow imparted by the inner plastic bladder, or am I just imagining it due to earlier experiences with the cheap stuff?
I am not a wine snob, and rarely drink the stuff, but why on earth anyone would ever buy a “box wine” is beyond me. If you are not interested in quality, just get some vodka and be done with it. Nothing personal meant at all Spectre, just saying.
I doubt the container has any negative effect whatsoever on the taste of the wine. The box/collapsable bag is actually a high quality container that keeps the wine from being exposed to oxygen until it is poured.
The problem with those wines is the market. The wine market in general is hooked on the “750ml glass bottle, natural cork” idea. Every step you deviate from that, you take a hit in the price you can charge. Wine in a box is the lowest of the low, maybe even lower than gallon screwtop jugs. The people who buy it are looking for cheap wine, and the manufacturers expect them to have less sophisticated wine palates, so they make it a sweeter wine.
It’s a shame because a percentage of wines packaged with natural cork always go bad. The bottle is not always the right size. The container is difficult to re-seal. A couple who want to each have one glass of wine with dinner are left with a half bottle of wine oxidizing in their fridge. Alternate packaging is apparently making inroads with the restaurant market, nobody cares if wine by the glass has a natural cork, except for the workers who are pouring it, they love the screwtop/box convenience.
I know this is often considered to be a mark of a “crap” wine, along with screwtops or synthetic corks, but that’s actually a misconception. Boxed wines are becoming very popular in many countries, Australia and New Zealand among them, and quite a few wines of good quality from those areas are being sold in boxes. The advantages of boxed wine are that you don’t have to worry about cork failure and that a wine does not have to be consumed right away once it’s opened.
As to the OP, I’m sorry, but I haven’t had a chance to do any head-to-head comparisons of boxed vs. bottled wines, so I couldn’t say if that’s the case.
There are some perfectly adequate boxed wines these days - it ain’t just Franzia anymore. There’s one that I like when I just want one glass of red, can’t think of the name of it because it’s at home, but with a bottle you have to put it in the fridge and wait for it to warm up and all, and if you don’t want any the next day it won’t be good. You can leave the box on the countertop and have a glass or two whenever you like. I like good wine, I keep a lot of good wine around, but when I just want one glass for me, often I hit the box.
Seconded. Although the bags used do give the wine a relatively short shelf life due to gas permeability. Under a year in most cases.
This isn’t true anymore, there are some decent quality boxed wines out there now, but I think the big players - Franzia, Almaden, Peter Vella, are still low quality.
While I’ve had some that were perfectly drinkable, I haven’t found any that blow me out of the water. There were a few good finds out there a couple of years ago when there was a huge wine lake in California, but as the lake dried up, so did the better quality box wine market for the most part. There are some good ones coming out of New Zealand and Australia, but I don’t buy those either, I figure if I’m going to drink cheap, I might as well drink cheap and local.
Black Box is decent, but if I look hard enough, I can find better deals and get more variety for that money. We do usually keep a box of red and a box of white on hand for cooking, and I’ve been known to drink a glass or two while I’m at it.
I’d say this is probably the case, even with the better quality wines. Some might be sweeter than others, but I do think they are all a bit sweeter than many standard ‘bottle & cork’ wines simply to appeal to the market.
I’m not sure where ‘the bottle isn’t always the right size’ is coming from. Natural corks do fail, but this statement puzzled me.
Corks are measured in fractions of millimeters when fitted to bottles and are often custom made. If a cork should fail because of fit to bottle, that’s not the fault of the cork, that’s human error, IMO, and a shame indeed.
Three glass bottles of Little Penguin Shiraz costs and tastes exactly the same as one box of Little Penguin Shiraz. Only you get the equivalent of four bottles for that price.
There are better wines in boxes now, but just like any bottled wine. . .you need to taste them yourself and draw your own conclusions.
But, even the higher priced boxed now are about $20 for the equivalent of 4 bottles of wine. That’s a pretty nice discount over even an $8 bottle, and I’d be willing to put most $20 boxes up against most $8 bottles. At that price point it’s really just a matter of what flaws you find least objectionable.
On top of that. . .a box is a vastly superior means of distributing wine compared to a bottle. I’d pay the equivalent price for what I normally pay for my bottles if they put it in a box. . .meaning I’d buy $40-$50 boxes of wine if they made them.
I meant that 750ml isn’t always the ‘right’ amount of wine for a particular occasion. A wine store will have hundreds of those bottles and just a few larger/smaller bottles and not of the better brands. Other products either come in single servings (beer) or are shelf stable (liquor).
I read that as two different comments. The first is natural corks do fail sometimes, and the wine goes bad. The second comment is that sometimes you just want a glass of wine, and opening a bottle is a waste, as you are left with a lot of wine that will oxidize.
But I could be wrong.
My BIL, who owns a winery, wishes he could get consumers to go for screwtops and boxed wine, but it’s a hard sell right now. Over time, people will realize that corks are not a very good way to seal wine. Expect both bottling methods to gain more market share (and will have better wines) over time.
That’s it, that’s the ones I like. They’re completely awesome for cooking, also - you always have it around and open. Can’t stand opening a bottle whether I want to drink it or not just so I can have, like, a quarter cup of white wine for a recipe. But like I said, I keep both around - for me they serve different purposes, boxes and bottles.
Well I don’t buy boxed wines myself, for reasons that should be clear from my OP, but people buy them because the inner bladder system is supposed to preserve the wine better than a half-empty bottle bottle would, by protecting it from the air. Except for rare occasions when my wife wants a glass or two, I’m the only one who drinks wine and it takes me a couple days or more to get through a standard bottle. It can take longer if say, on the second day, I’d rather have a Scotch or two. My s.o.p. now is to decant a new bottle of wine into two half-bottles that I wash out and re-use, and that basically works to preserve it, but not over a huge stretch of time.
Getting back to the sweetness issue, I believe it comes down to two sweeping generalizations (right now, you know I’m being rash.) We Americans tend to like things a bit sweeter than most of the rest of the world does. We don’t like to talk about it, but it’s true.
Our wine makers know that, and they cater to our sweeter tastes. The lower the price, the more likely a wine will nudge toward the sweet. So far, most of the box wines are the inexpensive, sweet ones. If you look past the Franzia and Vella section, you can find exceptions, but we don’t buy as many of those.
